The Everywhere President

Did you miss President Barack Obama the other day discoursing on college basketball on ESPN? Then perhaps you caught him instead Thursday night chatting with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”

Wondered how the first family stays in such fine shape in the White House? Michelle Obama described their morning workouts earlier this month in People magazine. Last winter, before taking office, the president-elect and his wife also shared their thoughts on the family’s eating habits for Parents magazine.

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From CNN to Men’s Journal, Obama has decided to make himself the Everywhere President.

In the midst of a severe recession, with two wars overseas, a new president is unavoidably going to be at the center of the news universe. Obama has taken this intense public interest to a new level — encouraging a highly personalized, uncommonly intimate presidential image.

As communications strategy, the idea seems to be that Obama is the Oprah of politics: People will buy his policies because he is on the cover. But a personality-driven presidency does have its risks.

Part of the dignity of the Oval Office comes from a sense of distance, says Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, and that makes what Obama is doing tricky. “He’s trying to metaphorically remove the moat from around the presidency, but that can be a dicey kind of thing,” he says. “People can be really fickle about this kind of stuff. It is a tough balancing act.”

Different presidents have struck this balance in different ways. George W. Bush did not seem interested in (or, by the unpopular end of his presidency, capable of) creating a cult of personality. Bill Clinton, by contrast, surrendered any mystique when prosecutors in the Monica Lewinsky case gave the public a far more intimate view of his personal life than he ever wanted.

For this president, Obama’s “charm and glamour” give him an opportunity that a lot of presidents don’t have — but one that he’s got to take carefully, said former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. When a president is in the public eye too often, she says, “at some point, people stop listening.” And right now, she adds, Obama’s ubiquity may also remind the public that he’s got a shallow bench: It “underscores that he doesn’t have the team of surrogates that he needs yet.”

Personal-branding expert William Arruda agrees that betting the success of his policies so heavily on the strength of his personality is definitely a gamble. “There’s a risk because he is so visible; he’s become the face of everything that happens,” he says. In that situation, a wrong step could have far-reaching consequences — especially if there is no one else in the administration visible enough to take the fall. “Could it bring his whole brand down? I think that depends on the issue,” he says — and whether it strikes at the heart of what Obama stands for.

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For example, Arruda says, the public forgave Martha Stewart’s stock snafu because her transgression was not a violation of what people love about her. “If we learned that she didn’t know how to make papier-mâché snowflakes, or that none of the recipes were actually hers, or that she stole them from someone else,” he says, “her brand would not have survived.”

Thompson says the strategy’s long-term success is a sort of chicken-and-egg proposition: Obama’s presidency will lean heavily on his popular appeal — and his reception in the popular culture will depend on how successful he is as a president. “We will keep liking him if people get a sense that there is a forward trajectory to the positive. If not, not only could it become a disadvantage, but each of those appearances gets a target drawn on it.”

The Republicans have already started aiming at it. During a news conference Thursday, Senate GOP leaders took shots at Obama for appearing on ESPN to fill out his NCAA tournament bracket and doing “The Tonight Show” in the midst of an economic crisis.